Was there ever a black king during the dark ages of Britain? Shakespeare drew some of the inspiration for King Lear from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, though we will never know whether he pondered the reference to one Gormund, “King of the Africans … who by the treachery of the Saxons sailed across with a hundred and sixty-six thousand Africans into Britain”.

Shakespeare’s tragedy is primarily concerned with the awful totality of existence rather than the social politics of ethnicity. But the casting of Don Warrington in the central role permits Talawa’s artistic director, Michael Buffong, to pursue the conjecture that black people were not alien to our ancient past, merely insufficiently recorded in its history.

Don Warrington: 'I can be angry. I can want to kill'

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Warrington made a remarkable impact with the same director in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at the Royal Exchange in 2013, and they build on that achievement here. Warrington presents a powerful, tyrannic figure, his face screwed into an expression of perpetual puzzlement at the universe’s refusal to bend to his will. His verse-speaking is clipped and often aggressive, yet he sows the seed of his tragedy before even uttering a word, as he pauses to nuzzle Pepter Lunkuse’s resolute Cordelia in a show of overly fond fatherly affection, before getting down to the business of parcelling out his kingdom.

Designer Signe Beckmann presents a barren disc of compacted brown earth, echoing the observation of Miltos Yerolemou’s irrepressible rubber ball of a Fool that his master has become “an O without a figure”. Fraser Ayres is one of the most dangerously unstable Edmunds of recent times; among a cast of remarkable strength, one is even struck by the comic value of Thomas Coombes’s pathetically prim and proper Oswald. There will never be such a thing as a definitive Lear, but you need look no further for a plausible alternative.